I'm guilty, but I'm not to blame

While queuing for petrol last week - because I had a genuinely empty tank and not because I was scared of shortages - I spent my time stuck behind a fleet of other cars all driven by owners who clearly were scared of shortages because they only had on average about 16 seconds' worth of tank that needed filling.

This gave me plenty of time to reflect on the nature of guilt. Here I was, not panic-buying but actually buying, yet the truth was I'd let my tank get so low because I was frightened of looking like someone who was convinced that if they didn't have their tank contents continually slopping out the side of their car they would in some way die.

So I didn't go and fill up until I absolutely had to, and let my tank get so empty that the chances of my dying on a car journey were actually increased, since any journey I made was liable to end with my car suddenly coming to a halt in the middle of a motorway.

We hear a lot about fear of crime, but not enough about fear of looking like you're guilty. The two may be linked. The police tell us crime is down but our fear of it is up. This fear generates mental, but unreal, images of more criminals than there actually are.

Since we now collectively postulate the existence of more criminals than there are crimes, to make ourselves not seem totally mad, we also conclude that some of us must make up the as yet undetected criminal fraternity.

Since we don't know exactly who these people may be, there's a part of us that worries it could possibly be us. Nervous we're secretly guilty of something, even though we don't know of what, we do our best to hide our possible shame. And so an endemic fear of coming over as suspicious or in any way strange hangs over us like a damp pudding. In fact, this fear spreads just as we're told that guilt is ridiculously old fashioned. Mitigating circumstances for any kind of behaviour are on the increase while politicians and major institutions have perfected a language of non-culpability.

So if a statesman wants to apologise for, say, calling all Brummies 'cack-headed steampots', he or she will then utter an apology which still absolves themselves from blame. A statement will be issued apologising for any offence that people might have taken at the words, thus slyly pinning the blame on others for being so hypersensitive in the first place rather on the politician for being an elected dick.

This eradication of personal blame reached its zenith recently when a clearly lying Hillary Clinton said she had merely 'misspoke' when saying she once ran for cover under Bosnian sniper fire as, in fact, video footage showed her clearly walking around with her daughter and kissing people.

'Misspeaking' is a new stage in the evolution of public language into a thing in which words have no objective meaning or moral resonance in themselves, but can be whatever the speaker intends them to be.

Hillary Clinton is the biggest liar in the history of politics, a self-confessed Holocaust-denier and the abductor of at least 17 children, but she can't now take legal action against me for mentioning this because I simply mis-wrote. I meant to write: 'I like her very much' but accidentally didn't.

I could go on to say that David Miliband was created in a laboratory by taking the stem cell DNA of a woman and injecting them into the eggs of a pony, or that Kirsty Young likes to unwind in the evening by dancing naked with a vacuum cleaner as she hoovers up scuttling hamsters she breeds for the purpose and neither of them can touch me for it since all I did was misfact-check this sentence.

Misdoing anything opens up a breach in ethics that can never be closed. It removes culpability from any distortion and makes anything, no matter how heinous, a complete accident. A drunk driver who crashes a car into someone can now apologise for miscounting his alcohol intake before going on to misdrive into someone he mistook for a road. I can happily write back to my bank and explain that I've merely mis-defaulted, a thug can explain in court that he simply misstabbed, British Airways can smile at the goings-on at the opening of Terminal 5 and explain that all that's happened is that they've momentarily misrun a national airline, and, five years after the event, George Bush can look at the resounding inconclusiveness of his entry into Iraq and explain to the American people that it now appears he may have misinvaded.

In Austria at the moment, we even have a man who locks his daughter up for 24 years and continually rapes her but who still feels he can launch some sort of charm offensive in a magazine by pleading it's all because he was brought up by the Nazis. His entire defence rests on us accepting that he mislived, and while it won't wash, reality's taken a terrible turn when someone like him can even think it just might.

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